College degree, education not the same

Friday

Mar 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMMar 27, 2009 at 4:21 AM

Think fast: What’s a college education for?

Benjamin Wachs, columnist

Think fast: What’s a college education for? Back when I was an adjunct college professor, I would ask that question of every class I had — whether we were at a community college or a major research university — and most of the students, who had sweated bullets to get in, would admit they’d never really thought it through.

Most of us, I’ll warrant, haven’t. Including college administrators.

This hasn’t been a big question in the recent past, when the economy was soaring and universities had the funds to be all things to all people — or at least to put on a costume and act that way. But now, with the economy in crises and funding for higher education sinking so fast you’d think the Titanic had been hit by the Exxon Valdez, that costume has become too expensive for the public to buy.

Now, in our time of crisis, colleges and universities are being told to return to their core mission.

But what is that?

If you read the news reports, you’d get the impression that they don’t know. I think they don’t.

When I asked my students, the answer that most readily came up was economic: “A college education exists to help me get a good job.”

But of course that’s nonsense, as anyone with a good job can attest. Most of us use virtually none of what we learned in college on a daily basis at work — and to the extent we do, that information would have been better conveyed through an intensive trade school.

The college education has become such an important credential for a good job that the content of that education has been rendered irrelevant. What we learned is less important than the fact that we learned it. By the time you’re on your second job nobody cares what you majored in, but it still matters if you never went to school.

So while many students may be getting a degree to get a good job, the education they receive has almost nothing to do with it.

The next answer my students came up with was civic: College educations exist to train good citizens. There’s some truth in this. A knowledge of history, science, economics, even literature can all be seen — in some way — as useful skills for members of a democracy to have.

But if citizenship were a real priority then a strong core curriculum would be essential. Instead, the whole of the 20th century was a movement away from an education that bound students together and toward an education that let them pursue their own callings. What kind of education designed to create good citizens would let students major in “pre-law?” The idea that future lawyers or doctors could opt out of a citizenship-based curriculum to focus on their professions is nonsensical. They arguably need it most.

The final answer, one that’s a favorite of academics, is that a college education is intended to develop critical thinking skills. It gives students the tools they need to evaluate truth, society and their place in it for themselves.

Uh-huh. Because that’s what college students are known for: Original thinking.

Some professors try; some even succeed. But an institution dedicated to creating non-conformists wouldn’t get nearly so upset as colleges do when someone refuses to pay tuition.

At that point, my students ran out of ideas — and that’s where America sits today. We’d be happy to get back to basics, if only we knew what they were.

I suspect that this confusion, even in boom times, is what was dragging the quality of American education down even as inflated grades went up. When teachers and administrators can’t agree on what they’re supposed to be doing — let alone teachers and students — confusion results.

We need to have a conversation about this, and we’d be doing ourselves a favor if we stopped pretending. Stop pretending that a college education is more important to a career than a good work ethic and people skills. Stop pretending that a man who can quote Abraham Lincoln from memory is necessarily more honest than someone who has never read the Gettysburg Address.

Stop pretending that test prep has anything to do with original thinking.

If we want education for the sake of careers, we can do a lot better than colleges. If we want education for the sake of citizenship, we need to start a lot earlier. And if we want to inspire critical thinking … well … no one really knows how we do that. Even teachers.

For myself, standing in front of the students, I was always happy if I could just get them to ask interesting questions, and interested in finding honest answers.

That, and for their writing to improve by the end of the semester. It’s harder than it looks.